More than gadding about

FROM the Wandering Jew to the Lambeth Walk, via the Sony Walkman and much else besides, it is hard to find any literary, cultural or historical reference to walking that is not included in Geoff Nicholson's bewitchingly informative treatise.

Lovingly collected factoids leap off the page. British troops in the first world war were given “forced march tablets” consisting of cocaine. It takes a brisk 35 miles (56km) to burn off a pound (0.45kg) of body fat. Some of the commonest synonyms for walk in the English language (such as trudge, stroll and saunter) have no clear etymological roots. The best term associated with walking is not English at all: the French flâner, he writes, is “a truly wonderful word…it can mean to stroll, but it can also mean the act of simply hanging around.”

This book is no mere miscellany, but the story of a man's love affair with the oldest means of locomotion: one foot in front of the other. Walking, he says, is like sex: “basic, simple, repetitive activities…capable of great sophistication and elaboration. They can be completely banal and meaningless, and yet they can also involve great passions and adventures. Both can lead you into strange and unknown territories: a walk on the wild side.”

Mr Nicholson lives in Los Angeles where walking is regarded as eccentric and can get you arrested. But as he explains, that is part of the fun. Readers who don't know the car-choked geography of that sprawling city may prefer the chapters on New York and London. He tramps the full length of London's ghastly Oxford Street six times in a day, and makes it sound enjoyable and interesting.

Part of the fun is the way he condenses the work of others who have approached the subject pompously or sententiously. He quotes a literary theorist, Michel de Certeau, who writes that walking “is a process of appropriation of the topographical system…a special acting-out of the place…it implies relations among differentiated positions”. Mr Nicholson summarises this as: “writing is one way of making our world our own, and walking is another.”

The wafflier the piffle, the more sharply Mr Nicholson wields his skewer. His deadpan treatment of “psychogeography” (imagine modern literary criticism applied to the layout of car parks) is howlingly funny. So are his demolitions of the sub-Thoreau ramblings of “New Agers”. Which bit of nature have they been walking in: “Frozen wastes? Disease-ridden jungle? Malarial swamp? Or just the local park?”

The best thing about walking is that you are your own boss: start and halt, look at everything or nothing, think about a lot or a little. And nobody (except perhaps a suspicious LA cop) will stop you.